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Doug on Cloud

How To Uncork the Cloud Bottleneck

Last year I had an important cloud question: How much delay does the cloud introduce and therefore how much slower are cloud apps and services than their on-premises brethren. I hit up all the experts including vendor and there were many well-researched and thought out answers. Unfortunately each was different.

Some believed there was no significant latency in cloud apps, a logically vacant conclusion. Others saw that all the network hops and often slow enterprise egresses made the cloud virtually unusable. My determination is, it's somewhere in between.

I also spent a fair bit of time discussing how your WAN should be optimized for cloud access and what to look for in cloud apps and service such that your end users won't wring your neck after installation.

Linthicum looked at the public cloud, otherwise known as the Internet, and saw it wanting. While the internal processing on service provider server farms is usually snappy, the public cloud is less so. And when you have a chatty app, which needs to update user screens and so forth, the whole system bogs down.

Apps that don't require all that chatter, however, can work quite well on the public cloud.

A logical alternative, Linthicum believes, is building your own cloud. By having an on-premises cloud, you control the speed because it is based on your servers and runs on the network you designed.